This explains the right wing agenda perfectly: They want to re-establish the age of the robber barons. The Robber Barons weren’t robbers – they were capitalist heroes. “The overarching task of the conservative historian is to rehabilitate the image of capitalism, even at its most red-toothed and -clawed. Not a hard job, as both our history and culture ceaselessly celebrate the innovative dynamism of American business.” “But one of the rare areas in which history teachers are allowed to criticize unfettered capitalism is the Gilded Age of the robber barons -- Morgan, Rockefeller, Carnegie, Fisk, et al. These men, many of whom first rose to prominence through unseemly wartime speculation, built enormous fortunes on the exceedingly generous terms of the times, which included bribery, monopolies, and stock manipulation, perverting the alleged power of the free market on their own behalf. They were kind of like the Goldman Sachs and Lehman Brothers of their day -- except they never got caught.” “They tend to skirt the smelly stuff, and talk instead about how Carnegies machinations drove down the price of steel -- surely youre not against low prices? And if Jay Gould and Cornelius Vanderbilt paid off legislators to acquire land for their railroads, the railroads got built, and thats what counts.” “Why do they so eagerly defend the robber barons even at their worst? Maybe because, as economist Brad DeLong has noted, the grotesque inequity in American wealth that characterized their era has only one equivalent in U.S. history -- that of our own time.” alternet.org/tea-party-and-right/10-historical-facts-only-right-winger-could-believe?akid=12657.295789.Ht3jbh&rd=1&src=newsletter1029854&t=7
Posted on: Wed, 07 Jan 2015 14:44:18 +0000
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